Friday, October 19, 2012

Reasons to celebrate!

Some days I look at what happened over the years, and sadly, I can’t say that all that happened was planned, but for sure there was always a goal.

My goals are always set way high, just in case I achieve them, so when we first looked at the NonStop managed clouds demo all I could think of was just how cool it would be to partner with HP, get the “Sydney boys” (Managing Director, Peter Shell, Chief Architect, Neil Coleman, and Development VP, Dave Finnie) involved, and come out with a world class solution for those who can’t afford to lose their transactions in the clouds.

Richard gave me this look that said “in your dreams”, but unless you have dreams you just stay put, and do not get any closer to your goals.

So we started talking with the HP guys demonstrating the product, Justin in particular (that’s Justin Simonds), Richard wrote a few posts to the NonStop community blog promoting the effort, we sure admired what they’ve done, and we really liked them and their enthusiasm.

Yes, you may wonder why I am posting this picture of a wonderful cheese and pate platter – there is a reason! When a goal is achieved, a deal is done, a task is completed or the first phase of my dream take on shape, we tend to look at each other with the “this calls for celebration” expression – and off we go to have a glass of wine and a meal in one of our favorite restaurants. The wine and cheese place that serves this fabulous spread is on the list of fun places to use for celebrations.
And now we are working with the same HP guys; the next step is for us at Infrasoft to figure how will we take the concept and the APIs and build it into our uLinga product. uLinga for clouds! I like how it sounds.

But there’s a lot more! Following briefings with the team at HP, we now have the code – gateways, APIs, tables and files, and the “Sydney boys” have completed installing it all on the NonStop system. Some of you may have seen Dave Finnie at the NonStop “boot-camp”, where there were discussions with HP – the focus being squarely on our early feedback and on what we have observed to date.

Whether we facilitate the use of NonStop on the edge of two or more clouds, projecting a level of availability and robustness that is usually only ever associated with NonStop, or cater for Java applications running on NonStop that are CPU intensive and “burst them into the Cloud”, or, perhaps, we go the other way, where for reasons of security or data integrity, or even just for compliance, there could be markets for syphoning transactions out of the Cloud. It’s all early days, but in discussing possible capabilities with users, the suggestions are coming fast.

There’s still the roadmap to complete, and with a completed roadmap I expect there will be even more wine and cheese!!